Hooray for sharia
The Huffington Post (who else?) gives a woman named Sumbul Ali-Karamali a space in which to say “what is all this fuss about sharia, sharia is perfectly fine, and besides it’s not the law anywhere, and besides everything is culture, and besides islamophobia, and besides you have to interpret.”
There are six principles of shariah. They are derived from the Qur’an, which Muslims believe is the word of God. All Islamic religious rules must be in line with these six principles of shariah…The Qur’an is old. The fiqh books of jurisprudence are old. To modern eyes, they can look just as outdated as other ancient texts, including the Bible and Torah. That’s why, just like the Bible and the Torah, the Islamic texts must be read in their historical context.
In other words, it’s the same old have-it-both-ways bullshit. On the one hand it’s the word of god, but on the other hand we can’t help noticing that some of it is disgustingly savage so we sagely observe that it’s old and therefore has to be read “in its historical context,” which being interpreted means altered so that the disgusting savagery gets ignored or turned into a metaphor or otherwise sidelined. But then why not just admit that what you’re doing is trying to shape laws to what is best for human beings (and perhaps animals and the planet) rather than obeying rules handed out many centuries ago by a god? Because we want to have it both ways, that’s why.
Shari’a is a set of religious principles and is not the law of the land anywhere in the world. The 50-some Muslim-majority countries are all constitutional states and nearly all of them have civil codes (many of these based on the French system).
…And? She doesn’t say. The implication seems to be that all those constitutions bar sharia as law, but in fact, that’s far from the truth. Some majority-Muslim countries already make their laws “sharia-compliant” and others are working on it.
The Qur’an contains many verses advocating religious tolerance, too, though the anti-Islam protesters won’t believe it.
Yes we’ll believe it, but we’ll also point out that it contains many other verses advocating much nastier things and that those verses are not a dead letter.
I wonder – in all seriousness – if Sumbul Ali-Karamali herself would actually like to live in Swat or Afghanistan or Somalia or Sudan or Algeria or Saudi Arabia or northern Nigeria. If she wouldn’t, she should think hard about why. If she would, she and I inhabit different universes, and I don’t know how to address her.
Thank you for ripping that article apart. I found it infuriating, condescending, patronizing, and just plain idiotic.
I wish apologists for Islam would spend their time preaching to the same Muslims they blame for being “extremists”. What on earth is she telling all of US this for?
Yes, but even read “in historical context”, she comes up with a list of principles which are by no means liberal ones:
1. The right to the protection of life. 2. The right to the protection of family.3. The right to the protection of education.4. The right to the protection of religion.5. The right to the protection of property (access to resources).6. The right to the protection of human dignity. [The html doesn’t allow line breaks, at least not in the preview pane.)
If these are liberal principles I’ll eat my new hat (which has lights on it, so I could read when Earl knocked the power out!).* Look at number 4, the protection of religion. That’s a pretty open principle. What is religion? Well, according to Sharia, only Islam reallhy measures up, despite what the disingenuous Sumbul Ali-Karamali has to say. She seems to think it is about freedom of religion, but it’s not. And then there is the protection of the family. Well, we know what that can mean. Christians always protect their prejudices under the rubric of the family, and we know what draconian rules Sharia lays down for the ‘protection of the family.’ Women only count for half a person, for example, since men are rulers of the family, and in order to protect the family men have to be given the power and authority to do so. And just think what protection of education or dignity might entail according to Sharia. I can easily imagine.
It really is hard to believe that someone can be so dim-witted as Sumbul Ali-Karamali. Does she imagine that others have not been watching to see how Islamic law gets interpreted around the world? Nevertheless, such people are dangerous, because, for some idiotic reason, because she is religious, she automatically gets credit for sincerity and profundity. The real problem is that, whether interpreted in context or not, Sharia stays the same, and all the idiocies that are practiced in its name around the world will be practiced wherever it is in force. Hermeneutics, as we learned awhile ago, is an auction, and the price is already pretty high for fanatical readings of Sharia. How can she possibly say Sharia and Constitution of the US in the same sentence, let alone claim that they are mutually supportive?! Religious stupidity never ceases to amaze me. I should be used to it by now, but I’m not. And it’s not as though I never noticed. I used to say that the thing that would keep from being a Christian, if I were not one, is what most Christians believe! See what I mean. Stupid! Religious stupidity!
*In fact, I had a note about the post on Julian Baggini, but then lost it when my computer shut down. See about it tomorrow. But I am glad you highlighted this stupid Sharia business. This one really takes the cake! (Do people still use that expression?)
My pleasure, W, and good point – why indeed.
It’s good that it never ceases to amaze you, Eric. I think we shouldn’t get used to things like that. Very true about the six principles; I nearly commented on that too. That piece is so full of nonsense it’s hard to get to all of it.
I usually say takes the biscuit, instead, because it amuses me. Don’t forget to give us note on Baggini tomorrow!
There’s an episode of the show 30 Rock where Tracy Jordan is getting a DNA test and asks the incompetent Dr. Spaceman if it will tell him what diseases he’ll get or if it will help him remember his ATM code. To which Dr. Spaceman replies, “Absolutely. Science is whatever we want it to be.” That line basically goes through my head whenever I hear one of these woolly apologies for religion – “sharia is whatever we want it to be.”
It’s totally not unreasonable for observers to look at states that claim to base part of all of their legal code and system on sharia (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, etc.) and see that it’s not exactly compatible with human rights, freedom of conscience, or gender equality. This woman’s problem doesn’t seem to be so much with people who look at these case studies of actually existing real-world sharia and think it’s not to hot but rather with the people who are actually implementing sharia in the real world. Maybe she should direct her complaints to King Abdullah and Ayatollah Khamenei and Mullah Omar instead. Call me crazy, but I think they’ll be telling her she’s the one misinterpreting sharia.
Something that doesn’t often get commented on: what “historical context” can justify the barbarity of these ancient texts? If you make this claim, you are stating (even though you’re not even aware of it) that there was a time in which it was acceptable or understandable to kill entire villages, rape the women, and cut the fetuses out of their pregnant wombs. When, and in what circumstance, would it ever be remotely acceptable for human beings to do this to each other? Anyone? Hello?
Quite so, Josh. And then next day we’ll be told how defective atheist morality is because it isn’t objective and absolute like God X’s moral truths.
I think that Sumbul Ali-Karamali needs to go on the grand tour: start by living for a week in Bahrein (which an Arab I met once told me is the most liberal place in the Arab world) then a week in every Arab capital, culminating with a whole year living in Riyadh. Hell, the Saudis might even finance her on the promise of a favourable article or two at the end (or whatever favourable disposition to sharia she has left.)
Maybe then she would give up trying to condition us all to the view that sharia would not be so bad in the US, where she presently chooses for some undisclosed reason to live, or wherever else her lamentable HuffPost piece is read.
I certainly wouldn’t want to live in any country governed by Islam or any other religion. Too often, I think that religious people credit for the freedom they have to their religion (claiming that it promotes freedom, rights, etc.) when really, they have those rights and freedoms because they live in a secular country. They ignore the fact that people who live in countries that are actually run by their religions don’t have those rights. Even though my family practices a rather vague and moderate form of Islam (that I’m not entirely sure would be recognizable as Islam to the extremists), I still found that the ideas of equal rights, secularism, and freedom are much better than the ideas found in Islam. I have always been very grateful that I live in the US, because I know that if I lived in one of the countries run by Islam, my life would be much different and in danger.
Thanks for writing this. As an atheist from a Muslim family, I really appreciate that you and others such as yourself, who offer some reasonable criticism of Islam. I get really tired of the discrimination disguised as criticism that sometimes comes from those who promote Christian Nation nonsense.
Edit: I meant to write: “Too often, I think religious people give credit for the freedom they have to their religion”.
This post was a nice palate cleanser, since I felt a little vomit-y after reading this piece on HuffPo. Thanks Ophelia.
The least they could do is give the mighty Ayaan Hirsi Ali space to write a rebuttal, so that HuffPo’s (mostly) naive readership can at least see that the “what’s the big deal?” approach to Sharia is just plain silly. (Of course, they’d probably bury Ayaan’s piece and not feature it on the homepage, just as they do with Vic Stenger’s contributions.)
Very good comments all around. I agree that Ali-Karamali’s piece is distressing for many reasons. One thing that stood out for me is her claim that the term “shariah law” is a “misnomer, because shariah is not law, but a set of principles.” And then, by way of example, she mentions that stoning is a “punishment” applied as law by Saudi Arabia and Iran–incorrectly, of course, because they ignore the “strict…constraints” on it. She reassures her reader that there are “myriad limitations meant to make [stoning] inapplicable.” Where?! I couldn’t find evidence within her article for what she claims is so obvious or widely agreed upon. Her argument is dizzying and facile. It boils down to, please don’t pay attention to the bad stuff. And then, keenly ironic, her credentials are given: an attorney with a degree in Islamic law who implies (or am I reading too much between the lines?) that said law/religious principles might just be required reading for Constitutional scholars. (Yipes!)
The traditional Christian churches have long ago reached a point where they had to accept that the Bibel has a historical contest and that you have to interpret it to understand it. This leaves room for adjusting rules to the present situation and having both ways (this of course entails a lot of questions I won’t discuss here, but it does have its advantages).
Ali-Karamali and other apologists of saria take the same approach as most Chrsitians: don’t take holy books totally literally, you have to see them in their historic context. This approach is the very product of the “enlightenment” we miss from islam. This kind of enlightenment is indeed missing form islam, and suggesting that the direct word of god, the eternal truth as disclosed in the Quran has to be seen in its historic context, is for many muslim believers and scholars in itself a blasphemy.
In many islamic countries Ali-Karamali would be persecuted for having published this ‘blasphemous’ article.
I too was annoyed by this article. Yes, most Muslim-dominated countries have secular criminal law – but they do have family laws based on fiqh principles which empower men in marriages at the expense of women and children, and any attempts at reform are blocked in the name of sharia. When people start talking about the ‘protection of the family’ – (her 2nd principle of sharia) it’s almost always the protection of the patrifocal family against alternative, more egalitarian arrangements.
Eric, you don’t blog do you? I wish you would consider it. I believe you are working on a book, is that still the case? Given that your comments are invariably more thorough, lucid, and informative than what one typically finds above the comments section of most blogs, a McDonald blog is something I for one would love to see.
For me the real issue is that I have yet to find islamic scholars who are just honest about what sharia (and its many things depending on contexts) to a lay audience and compares the principles of secular legal systems with sharia on the level of what aspects of live and handled how.
That is the only intersting piece of information. That the Qur’an is old is trivial. That believers hold their respective text holy is too. That one can insist on historical context, not new.
It’s basically saying: You read it wrong, but I am not going to tell you what reading it right means.
That aside that of course there are plenty of countries and regions where sharia is the law of the land, the role of the cleric and the judge are not separated, qur’anic rules of evidence are (attempted) to be observed and so forth.
For example, in proper historic reading of the Qur’an should “fornicators” and “adulterers” be flogged 80 times? If no, why not, if yes, why? And why should I stand by if the answer is yes, when it means that large parts of my circles of friends and family should be flogged in that legal system simply because marriage is no longer seen as prerequisite for a loving and functional relationship.
Incidentally I found an article that Reza Aslan wrote in the daily beast about stoning similarly infuriating. He claims that Iranian legal system is actually not islamic law, claiming that stoning does not derive from the Quran. Well yes, but it does derive from the hadith, which he conveniently overlooks. So that way we suddenly get the narrative that sharia and the state are separate when an honest description of what is going on does not align all that well.
Basically to me much of that discussion is borderline if not outright obfuscation. Noone talks the hard talk.
I guess Sumbul Ali-Karamali ran out of space before she got around to mentioning the mass migration from western enlightenment, human secular, liberal based democracies to Islamic sharia based utopias.
Reza Aslan saying the Iranian legal system is not Islamic is quite funny (in a disgusting way). How would he go about convincing the mullahs of that?!
Sharia can, to a great extent, be whatever the dominant group wants it to be. With no central authority it can differ from country to country, province to province, village to village.
But it ensures that the dominant group doing the interpreting is the patriarchy.
In one place it might indeed be little more than an arbitration service (albeit one inherently biased in favour of patriarchs) and in another it might be an instrument of grotesque butchery.
Exactly. This is basically what I want to say to any religious person: do you want to live in a theocracy? If not, why not?
Reading all the “Iranian law is not *really* Islamic law” arguments has lead me to believe we can just about rename the No True Scotsman Fallacy the No True Sharia Fallacy.
Putting this stuff in its “proper historical context” just makes it all the more shocking. Remember, this is centuries after Plato. There’s some philosophy where the “proper historical context” is a valid argument — many of the ideas in The Republic seem just plain kinda stupid today, but of course the idea of trying to formalize thought to that level was revolutionary in its time.
Kinda makes the Torah, New Testament, and Koran look pretty crappy in comparison, eh? “Proper historical context” still makes those documents look pretty brutal and backwards.
Excellent, excellent point. Perhaps in arguing over whether Sharia really does or does not proscribe the kinds of brutality that is practiced by the Taliban and others, we have lost sight of the important point: It gives legal power to unsubstantiated dogma. It doesn’t really matter what that dogma is — it is still dangerous as all get out to elevate it in that way. (And as you point out, one non-negotiable feature of Sharia is the disenfranchisement of women)
Quite. This is why the Vatican’s adamant rejection of the ordination of women is so important: it means that all power, of interpretation and lawmaking and enforcement, is permanently restricted to men. It means that women are officially, permanently, on pain of damnation, barred from having any role in making and administering laws that are binding on them.
And I continue to be baffled that there are, apparently, people who self-identify as both Catholics and feminists. Hell, RichardDawkins.net recently had a link to an article from a poor deluded young woman who self-identified as both feminist and Mormon. (I couldn’t finish the article, as due to my Mormon upbringing it was just too close to home and too frustrating) I really really, really really, REALLY don’t get it.
I can understand being Christian and feminist. I think it requires some cognitive dissonance, but not really a shocking amount. Actually, a handful of the early Christian sects were radically in favor of gender equality. The problem with being Catholic or Mormon and feminist is that there is only one Catholic church, only one Mormon church (not counting minor splinter sects, of course). For someone who is just generally Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or whatever, there is wiggle room to assert, “Well, all of those other misogynists are just Doing It Wrong(TM). True Scotsmen believe in gender equality!” But if you are Mormon or Catholic, you are signed up to a specific organization that is undeniably misogynistic in the extreme. You can’t really be Catholic and say that the Pope is doing it wrong!